12yo Canadian boy hacked govt sites, gave info to Anonymous for video games

A fifth grader has admitted of being the mastermind behind hacker attacks that took down government websites during the 2012 Quebec student protests and passing some of the hacked data to the Anonymous group in exchange for video games.

The 12-year-old Canadian boy has pleaded guilty to causing three
incidents that paralyzed a number of government websites
including that of the Quebec Institute of Public Health, and the
Chilean government.

Some sites were out of service for as long as two days, the
Toronto Sun reports, while thousands of students were rallying
against tuition fee hikes in Quebec in 2012, clashing with police
and disturbing public order.

Police estimate that the child caused $60,000 in damages, as he
appeared before the court accompanied by his father and a lawyer
on Thursday.

In court, the lawyer had told the judge that the 12-year-old's
actions were not politically motivated.
"He saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old," his
lawyer said. "There was no political purpose," as quoted
by Toronto Sun.

The boy, who has been in hacking since the age of nine, was
practicing three basic types of attacks, a police expert told the
court.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was one of the
methods used by the fifth grader to break the government servers
by flooding them with traffic and rendering them ineffective.

Another way the young Montreal hacker disabled the systems was by
altering information and making it appear as a homepage with his
own information. In such an attack, known as website defacement,
the hacker gets access to a web server of the target and replaces
the original page with a fake one.

The child also exploited security holes to access database
servers. The boy allegedly had managed to mine personal
information belonging to the sites' administrators and users, and
sent some of the mined information to the hacktivist group
Anonymous in exchange for video games.

Others involved in the hacking attack have reportedly been
arrested but it was the boy who opened the way.

“And he told others how to do it,” explaining it was easy
to hack, but not so easy to remain untraced, a police expert
testified in Montreal court on Thursday.

According to the paper, a detailed report into the allegations
will be handed over next month when the 12-year-old is expected
to be sentenced.

It is not the first time in Quebec’s history that a minor has
plead guilty to hacking charges.

In 2001, a 17-year-old Canadian hacker was sentenced to an eight
month juvenile term for crippling several web sites when he was
15-years-old, including that of Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and
CNN, causing an estimated $1.7 million in damage.

Known as the "Mafiaboy," the teenager pleaded guilty to more than
50 charges related to the attacks. The judge in Montreal also
banned the teenager from owning any non-commercial computer and
talking to other hackers.

In his book, "Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man"
published in 2001, Michael Calce (Mafiaboy's real name), said
that his attacks in 2000 were "illegal, reckless and, in many
ways, simply stupid."